Documentary: “Citizen Power: More Direct Democracy?”

Posted on November 3, 2020 by Ahmed R. Teleb

Last week, a German documentary about their citizens’ assembly on “improving representative democracy,” which took place in Leipzig over two weekends in Sept. 2019, aired on MDR in Saxony and will air in other regions later. Bürger. Macht. – Mehr direkte Demokratie? is also available on YouTube in its entirety.

The film crew recorded the four days of deliberation at one of the 23 small group tables (table #20 I believe) in addition to the plenaries and the presentation of the “citizens’ recommendations” to parliamentary representatives two months later. The documentary profiled about half a dozen participants from different walks of life, interviewing them in their homes in the weeks following the Assembly. The facilitator at the table filmed was definitely one of the most experienced and probably one of the most effective, from my own observation of the event. That said, the particular group at each particular table was changed via lottery at the beginning of each day.

The style of the documentary is rather understated, and it does not take a position on the future role of CA’s, lotteries, or direct democracy–rather the polar opposite of a heavy handed Michael Moore film.

Of interest to Kleroterians might be the short “tutorial” about Athenian democracy at minute 19:00, a warning about the abuse of referenda during the NS era at 52:00, and the summary of the Irish Assembly at 1:03:30. A journalist hyper skeptical of citizens’ assemblies, lotteries, and “more participation” generally appears at 43:00 along with most of the talk he gave to the “Buergerrat” assembly. At 1:16:00, find drone footage of the installation art / performance “Democracy for Future” which took place on November 15, 2019 outside the Reichstag, shortly before participants from the Leipzig assembly (lot-based) and the regional conferences (self selected) met representatives from the six major parties in the Bundestag along with the Bundestag’s President in a half-day event.

As of now, I don’t know of subtitles other than in German, but will post here if that comes to my attention. Overall, I think the documentary does captures the overall mood of the assembly and what one of the better table discussions looked like.

Does anyone know of a similar documentary about either the Irish Assembly or the French Climate Convention, or any other recent CA for that matter?

Filed under: Applications, Deliberation, Experiments, Sortition | Tagged: | 3 Comments »

Belgiorno-Nettis: There’s a problem with elections

Posted on November 3, 2020 by Yoram Gat

Luca Belgiorno-Nettis, the founder and director of the newDemocracy​ Foundation, takes the opportunity of US elections day to propose sortition to the readers of The Sydney Morning Herald. Belgiorno-Nettis recounts Australia’s historical record of electoralist innovation.

Australia led the world in democratic innovations throughout the 19th century, beginning with the secret ballot, the first independent electoral commission, and then compulsory and preferential voting. […] New Zealand is often heralded as pioneering the vote for women, but it was Australia that also enabled women to stand for office – 20 years ahead of the Kiwis. The American political scientist Louise Overacker wrote in 1952: “No modern democracy has shown greater readiness to experiment than Australia.”

He then offers the adoption of sortition as continuing this trend:

[W]e need to go further. In 2017 the former secretary-general of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, said: “We need to make our democracies more inclusive. This requires bold and innovative reforms to bring the young, the poor and minorities into the political system. An interesting idea would be to reintroduce the ancient Greek practice of selecting parliaments by lot instead of election. In other words, parliamentarians would no longer be nominated by political parties, but chosen at random for a limited term, in the way many jury systems work. This would prevent the formation of self-serving and self-perpetuating political classes disconnected from their electorates.”
Continue reading →

Filed under: Elections, History, Press, Sortition | 3 Comments »

Random Selection for the Supreme Court

Posted on October 28, 2020 by Alex Kovner

In an opinion piece in The New York Times, Yale law student Melody Wang lays out an extremely cogent argument for random selection in choosing cases. She emphasizes the power of random selection to prevent corrupt practices, and to focus advocates on directing their arguments to the general good, rather than to specific decision makers.

Filed under: Academia, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 7 Comments »

Claude Sicard: Replacing representative democracy with participative democracy is dangerous, Part 1

Posted on October 28, 2020 by Yoram Gat

A translation of an article from Le Figaro.

Replacing representative democracy with participative democracy is dangerous
Claude Sicard, economist and international consultant
July 6, 2020

Seeing his popularity ratings decline, Emmanuel Macron appeals to the French people for a reform. For this economist, the head of state’s seemingly bright idea is a mistake because making decisions concerning the future of a country requires thorough study and the assistance of experts.

Macron at the Citizen Convention for the Climate at the Élysée, June 29, 2020.

The distance in our country between civil society and the institutions never stops increasing. In every democratic system it is the law that the majority prevails: the dominant fraction imposes its will on the minority, and the electoral moment is decisive for the duration of the mandate of the elected representatives. These principles are increasingly questioned these days. Minorities are increasingly unwilling not to be heard, and moreover they too often observe that the elected do not always have the virtues which they claimed to have during the campaign. Pierre Rosanvallon, a noted researcher of democracy, tells us that we are seeing in our modern democracies the rise of the “people as a judge”. The “monitoring citizen”, he says, is replacing the “voting citizen”. In this way a tendency has developed in our modern societies toward the creation of “counter-democracies”.

CEVIPOF surveys confirm this claim: 70% of the French think that in our country democracy “does not function very well”, and assert that they have no confidence in the ability of members of parliament to address issues that the country is facing. The American political scientist Yascha Mounk, a Harvard professor, writes in his book The People vs. Democracy published in 2018 that “in North America and in Western Europe, a growing number of citizens are turning their backs on democracy: they are feeling that they have less and less influence over political decisions”.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, Mass action, Opinion polling, Participation, Press, Sortition | 2 Comments »

Consent of the governed

Posted on October 26, 2020 by Yoram Gat

A few months ago I offered the following operational definition of “democracy”:

A regime is democratic to the extent that the people who are governed by that regime believe it serves their interests, where their opinions are equally weighted.

This definition is (quite close to being) an objective operationalization of the notion of democracy, I claimed. (It is not a full operationalization since the method by which people’s opinions about the regime are collected still needs to be fully specified. That, however, is an open-ended research program, so it cannot be fit into the space of a blog post.) It is certainly much more specific than the “essentially contested” literal “people power”. It is also more specific and less open for subjective interpretation than procedural definitions such as Schumpeter’s or Dahl’s, as well as having the advantage of not making quite absurd a-priori assumptions about the value of elections (or any other institutional procedure).

The proposal garnered some mixed reactions. Along with some support, there was a lot of criticism. Several commenters were concerned that this metric would indicate that China, Russia or other rivals of the West are more democratic than the West itself, a notion which they found patently absurd, it seems. Another objection was that an outcomes-based criterion for democracy cannot be satisfactory because any outcome can be produced by a dictatorship. It was also argued that according to this definition those who expose corruption in government and thus reduce trust in government could be blamed for destroying democracy. Occasionally the tone was that such a definition was a revisionist innovation and that whatever the definition of democracy is (no real alternative was offered, I believe), this obviously does not come close.

This seemed to lead the discussion to a dead-end. Yes, Prof. Wang Shaoguang has a pretty similar definition for what he calls “substantive democracy” and a survey he cites shows that this idea has wide support in China and its surrounding. But Prof. Wang and the Chinese are Chinese, so clearly they have nothing to teach Westerners about democracy (or maybe these are not even their true opinions and they are merely saying whatever they are saying in order to please whoever is eavesdropping). Moreover, even Prof. Wang still leaves room for “formal democracy” that would be defined differently.

It is only with great and inexplicable delay that I have recently realized how solid and respected is the pedigree of the proposed definition. Continue reading →

Filed under: History, Theory | 42 Comments »

What is a Majority?

Posted on October 23, 2020 by Alex Kovner

My latest post discusses citizen juries from the perspective cognitive science. Starting with the argumentative theory of reason, I argue that final decision makers must be insulated from any requirement of justifying their decisions. This is precisely what juries do in trials: they apply a community standard, one that is inscrutable to advocates within the system, who operate on the basis of rules. The lack of such a function in democratic systems is an existential flaw that sortition must aim to correct.

Filed under: Deliberation | Tagged: , , | 4 Comments »

Yamaguchi: Lottocracy: Considerations on Representative Democracy by Lot

Posted on October 20, 2020 by Yoram Gat

Akito Yamaguchi is a second-year doctoral student at the University of Tokyo, Japan, specializing in political philosophy, especially lottocracy. This is the author’s summary of a paper by Yamaguchi published in the Japanese Journal of Political Thought (May 2020).

Lottocracy: Considerations on Representative Democracy by Lot

This paper aims to examine the relevance of “lottocracy” as a lawmaking system. Lottocracy is the idea of a representative system in which representatives in the legislature are appointed by lottery rather than by election. This paper compares lottocracy and electoral democracy in terms of instrumental value, i.e., the value of the outcomes of these procedures. It assesses the value of both systems in terms of the interests of the people: how well do the systems promote the interests of the people?

To assess the instrumental value of the electoral and lottocratic systems, I use two methods. First, I use two criteria to assess the interests of the people: the criterion of equal reflection and the criterion of competence. The criterion of equal reflection is a criterion for assessing the extent to which the system equally reflects the will of the people. The criterion of competence is a criterion to assess for assessing how competent a legislator is in terms of lawmaking.

Second, I assess the electoral and lottocratic systems in both an ideal condition and a non-ideal condition. In the ideal condition, I assess each system in the condition in which it functions best. In the non-ideal condition, I assess each system in the real world in which we live.

Section 1 assesses both systems in the ideal condition. In the ideal condition, the electoral system is superior to the lottocratic system. This is because representatives who are superior to others are elected in the electoral system and so the electoral system is higher in terms of the criterion of competence. Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Elections, Proposals, Sortition | 11 Comments »

New edition of Down with Elections!

Posted on October 19, 2020 by campbellwallace

The latest edition of “Down with Elections! a plan for Democracy without Elections” is now available. The paperback is at https://www.amazon.com/DOWN-ELECTIONS-plan-DEMOCRACY-WITHOUT/dp/B0851M9H3F.

Users of this forum can obtain a free digital version (epub, mobi or PDF) directly from me (email to cwallace@free.fr).

Changes from the last published version (V3) are mainly explanatory, there are no major changes to the model of government proposed. (Changes from earlier versions are too numerous to list here.) Nothing I have seen or read recently has persuaded me that the overall design of the system proposed in the book needs changing, and events of the last few years – indeed of the last two hundred years – have only reinforced my opinion that we cannot have true democracy until we replace elected parliaments by ones chosen by lot.

Une version française est maintenant disponible (en broché) :
https://www.amazon.fr/démocratie-sans-élections-Campbell-Wallace/dp/B085R72PK5 (5,38 € + livraison)
ou
https://www.thebookedition.com/fr/democratie-sans-elections-p-372653.html (7,23€ + livraison)

On peut avoir la version digitale gratuitement en envoyant un mail à cwallace@free.fr.

Filed under: Books, Elections, Proposals, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Deliberative assemblies are finding their feet – but also facing political barriers

Posted on October 17, 2020 by Oliver Milne

On Friday the 16th of October, the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College hosted a webinar entitled ‘Revitalizing Democracy: Sortition, Citizen Power, and Spaces of Freedom’, which you can watch here. The workshop heavily featured people putting sortition into practice right now, and so the overall focus was very much on deliberative assemblies in advisory roles, rather than non-deliberative juries or lawmaking roles. If you’d rather not spend the whole day watching a videoconference, here’s the CliffsNotes:

David Van Reybrouck, who gave one of the keynotes, helped design the new citizens’ council and assembly system in the parliament of the German-speaking region of Belgium – an area with only 76 000 citizens, but devolved powers similar to Scotland’s. The system involves a permanent citizens’ council and temporary citizens’ assemblies, both selected by sortition, as well as a permanent secretary who acts as a sort of ombudsman for the system. The council sets the agenda for the assemblies, and chases up their conclusions in the regional parliament – essentially acting as an official lobby group for the assemblies’ recommendations. Politicians have to report back to the council a year after each assembly, setting out how they’ve acted on their recommendations and, if they’ve deviated from them, why. In this respect it is a major step forward in the institutionalisation of sortition. Under the Belgian constitution, however, sortitional bodies cannot be given legislative power, so the assemblies are restricted to an advisory role until and unless momentum can be built for a constitutional amendment.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Action, Applications, Deliberation, Opinion polling, Proposals, Sortition | 8 Comments »

View from participants of a citizens’ assembly

Posted on October 17, 2020 by Owen Shaffer

This is published with a few days’ delay – too late for readers to join the meeting being announced. If you are a contributor submitting a time sensitive post, please email Yoram Gat to make sure it is published promptly.

The US Chapter of the Sortition Foundation, now known as Democracy Without Elections, have 2 special guest speakers at our Chapter Meeting on Tuesday 13 October at 9pm Eastern US time; both were participants in a citizens’ assembly. They are from opposite ends of the political spectrum, and became friends.

If you would like join us and hear their perspective of being on the inside of a citizens’ assembly, contact me.

Filed under: Action, Sortition | Leave a comment »

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